


It’s An Old Song (We’re Gonna Sing It Again)

by gayfranzkafka



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: M/M, once again this is a story about stories, retelling of s4e05 as an Orpheus/Eurydice myth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-19
Updated: 2020-11-19
Packaged: 2021-03-10 07:15:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27629417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gayfranzkafka/pseuds/gayfranzkafka
Summary: A re-telling of season 4 episode 5 "The Late Captain Pierce" as the Orpheus/Eurydice myth, but maybe not in the way you'd expect. Once again this is a story about stories (and gay love).
Relationships: B. J. Hunnicutt/Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce
Comments: 26
Kudos: 40





	It’s An Old Song (We’re Gonna Sing It Again)

When I showed up, you were so full of life you were practically singing, and even with you mad as you were and not paying any attention to me at all, the first thing I thought was, _I don’t want this to end_. It’s funny, how I thought the ending first with us. Maybe it was because you were right on the tail of some kind of ending yourself ( _Ten lousy minutes!_ ), or maybe it was because the way you looked, and the way I felt about how you looked; maybe I knew there was something sort of ending for me right then, too, even if I wasn’t ready to admit it to myself just yet. You were standing there in the dust and the heat and an old uniform, and you were telling a story about some guy I’d never met, and I could see it written all over your face, how in love you’d been. And I could tell, right then, that I’d never really been in love, not ever, because I’d never missed someone like that, like you were doing right there in front of everyone you’d never met before and Radar too. Ten minutes, and you could have said goodbye, and I felt a jolt in my stomach like I always feel the moment a plane leaves the ground, and I thought, _It could end for us some day, too._ And I thought, _I want you to miss me like you miss him._

That’s crazy, isn’t it? Wanting you to miss me? Before I even knew you, the first way I could picture you loving me was as an absence, the lack of something that had once been there. Maybe because that was how I saw you loving him, or maybe because that was the way I fell for you; I had to realize that love was something I didn’t have yet, before I could see my way toward it with you.

Or maybe it was just because I wanted that first day to be the middle of our story. I wanted love to be something that had already been there between us, and which we could get back. To realize love as something totally new, something to be invented, would have been too much for me there in what was, despite my imagings, the first moment.

Here’s the thing of it; I was always meant to be Eurydice. I was made to listen: to listen to you talk, to listen to the stories you’d tell everyone in the mess tent, when you’d feign more energy than you had, when we were all seventy-two hours awake, when you were trying to keep everyone else going before you’d spare a thought for yourself. You could bear almost any pain, as long as it wasn’t your own; taking care of them was as close as you came to taking care of yourself. You’d think, _I can spare some tenderness amidst the blood on account of their exhaustion_ , and that was as close as you’d get to naming your own exhaustion, the kind that was somewhere deeper in you than sleep could fix.

I was made to listen to you sing, a thousand little songs you never meant as performance because they were just a part of you, your need to sing, it seemed, more innate in you than even your need to eat or sleep. They’d come spilling out of you at all times, melodies from your old records or the radio hits from back in the states bubbling up in the shower, or the mess tent, or the operating room, or even, sometimes, in your sleep. You never came in at the beginning; you always started singing them part way through, almost as if you were just drawing attention to something that had already been playing, something that no one but you had been able to hear.

And you almost never gave them a proper finish, either; you would get called away by someone who needed you. There was always _someone_ that needed you. There was always something that needed seeing to, and you always saw to it, but I—and this was something I never told you—I always picked the melody up, just there in my head, humming the lines to myself, making up the words if I didn’t know them. I couldn’t bear to leave them hanging on the six chord, not like you could, so I’d take them all the way back around to the one. It wasn’t that I wanted to finish them, really; often, once I got through, I’d start them all over again. It was that I didn’t want them to end.

So I was Eurydice; I was there to listen, not to create. I hadn’t been given anything that spectacular, nothing I was as good at as you. I was meant to follow where you led. As desperately as I wanted you to feel me there, the pricking sensation of my gaze on the back of your neck, I was terrified of you turning around and taking in the full truth of me. Whether you’d be disappointed, and leave me behind, or whether I myself would shrink back, unable to follow once you’d seen all of what I was, I wasn’t sure, but I was certain that, somehow, it would break. So I tried to keep a careful distance, close enough for you to know I was there without needing to see it for yourself.

I _wanted_ to wait, to allow myself the hope that you loved me without having to ask. I thought I could follow like that forever, because I didn’t see, at first, that you wavered, too. I thought, _I’ll go anywhere this man takes me_ , until the day that you lay down and refused to go anywhere at all.

That was the twist—those first few weeks of naming myself Eurydice, and you went to death first, and many times again after that. I’d realize, after I’d known you longer, that there was some magnetism there for you, that maybe the reason you could lead others away from it so well was that you were so familiar with it yourself, knew its tricks and allures just well enough to sneak around them. But sometimes it would overwhelm you; sometimes, you couldn’t pull yourself, or others, away. The first time it happened was on the bus, when you lay down and told me you were tired of fighting. That was the first time it really hit me, just how long you’d been there. That was the first time I really realized that it was taking a toll on you, too. I’d known, in some ways, from the moment I’d met you; but I’d thought, up till then, that you’d always get around it, find a way to move, if not forward, then sideways, at least. But that day you stopped moving altogether. The song went out of you.

I might not’ve done something, if it hadn’t been me that your father called. Two thousand miles and a stranger’s voice through the phone; at the time I didn’t realize what it was he was asking. None of us did. You took my hand so we could get a better signal, and still something got muddled. But we pieced it together later; your death, as the military saw it. A clerical error, and now some man in Crabapple Cove was grieving. And it had been me he called, to ask for answers. It had been me he thought could best tell him the story of his son’s death. Well, I was glad I hadn’t had to do just that, but I still felt some imperative somewhere in the assumption that he’d made.

I thought about my own daughter, then. Erin. Of course I did. How I’d feel if she—I couldn’t even let myself get that far. But how I felt, just having her that far away from me. How Daniel must feel. She was so young when I left, she—I’d read her stories, from the day she was born, but always from books. I’d never told her my own. When she got older, well—I’d wanted to tell her something I made up all myself, but I’d wanted to wait until she knew just what it was I was saying to her. My own dad had done that for me, spun a yarn every night before bed about a boy and his blue horse who drove around in a red convertible. I’d wanted something like that for me and Erin, something that wasn’t written down. But I’d wanted it to be something we made up together, something born from the questions she’d ask, when she was old enough to ask them; I’d wanted my story to start somewhere in the middle, you know—to be an answer.

But I hadn’t had the chance, before I’d left. I hadn’t gotten to know her, not her questions. I knew how she looked when she was sleeping, and the difference between the way she cried when she was tired and when she was hungry, and I swear I had every one of her fingers and toes memorized, but I didn’t know what questions she’d have. I wasn’t a born storyteller; it was something I’d wanted to grow into, for her.

So you weren’t dead, but your father didn’t know that, and you didn’t seem much like you wanted to live, either. It scared me. To tell you the truth, it scared me. I almost wanted to run, or even more, just stand still, close my eyes, wait for it to pass, wait for you to rouse yourself and come back to me of your own accord. Or to let somebody else do it, to save you. But I was worried there was nobody else; it was me your father had called.

I wondered what he would have said to you, if he’d known what was really going on, that you were alive, only not so cheerfully. I wondered what Trapper would’ve said—maybe nothing at all.

But I didn’t know either of them. I didn’t know what story it was that they might’ve told you to get you back off that bus and fully into the land of the living again. But I knew _you_. That was what I realized—I knew the stories you’d been telling, the songs you’d been singing. I thought maybe, just maybe, I could go and echo them back to you, and that might be enough. It would be proof. It would say, _See? I really have been here the whole time, listening. Even if you couldn’t always see me._

Only when I got onto the bus and told you my name, again, as if you didn’t know—you surprised me. You said, _I know_. Eyes closed, and you still knew I was there. I realized, then, that you’d known I was there the whole time, without ever having to turn around. I wondered, then, if that was why Orpheus turned—not some doubt in himself, but—maybe it was Eurydice that had needed him to look back. Maybe she’d begun to doubt herself, needed some proof that she was still there that she could only get from his eyes on her.

It would’ve been enough for me, you just saying, _I know_ the way you did. That could have kept me going for years. But I could tell it wasn’t enough for you, not yet, just having me there on the bus with you. There was something you still needed me to say. You asked me the question, _You wish you could go with me, don’t you?_ It was funny. I wanted to tell you, _Of course_. I wanted to say, _I’d follow you out of death, and I’d follow you into death._ I wanted to say, _I’m not trying to get anywhere, really. I’m just trying to go where it is you are._ Only I couldn’t. I didn’t know how to tell that story in a way that I was sure you wanted to hear, and especially not with the bus driver still sitting there at his wheel. I didn’t know where to start. But then, I realized, neither did you. You never knew how to start, you just dove on into the middle, so I decided to give you a beginning. A question. I said, _You really going home?_

That was when you opened your eyes, really began to talk. And that was the part that scared me the most, in some ways. You said, _Finally. I’ve been fighting death since I came over here. I’m tired of death. I’m tired to death. If you can’t lick it, join it. Right boys?_

That way you said it, I wasn’t sure what home was, anymore, and I wasn’t sure you knew either. You were someone who was almost always in motion, ping-ponging around camp and the swamp, perpetually on the move even in the small spaces you were given. I could follow you anywhere, as long as you weren’t standing still. So I did something I hadn’t expected I would ever do; I came as close to telling you what I needed as I could. I said, _You can’t go, Hawk._ I said your name short like that, a nickname for a nickname, so you’d know it was me. After so long of being scared that you’d see me too clearly, now with you looking right at me, I was afraid you wouldn’t recognize me. So I gave you something in my voice, too. And I told you that you couldn’t go, but what I meant was, _Anything as long as you don’t lie still like this._ Because I didn’t want it to end yet.

They don’t tell you, in the myth, how long they walked before Orpheus turned around. Maybe they walked for months. Maybe it was years. Maybe it was so long that they lost track of time altogether, started living out the days differently than most of us are used to. We do know, though, that they were near the world, again, when he turned. Maybe that was what did them in. Maybe after spending so long between the dead and the living, they were afraid they wouldn’t know how to be with each other in the world they had known before. Maybe, when he turned, he hadn’t meant to send her back and himself forward. Maybe he’d only meant to keep them there in that space between where it was they’d come from and where it was they were going.

So I told you, _You can’t go_ , and I meant, _You can’t sit still_. And then I turned and walked out of the bus, and I didn’t look back. Because that was not my role to play, not really. I was never a singer. But the trick of it is, just for a moment, you followed.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading, and as always, kudos & especially comments are appreciated 💕


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